[Python-Dev] PEP: Migrating the Python CVS to Subversion

[Jim Fulton]

Tim Peters wrote:
...
> I'm sending this to Jim Fulton because he did the conversion of Zope
> Corp's code base to SVN.  Unfortunately, Jim will soon be out of touch
> for several weeks.  Jim, do you have time to summarize the high bits
> of the problems you hit?  IIRC, you didn't find any conversion script
> at the time capable of doing the whole job as-is.  If that's wrong, it
> would be good to know that too.

I had two problems, one of which was zope specific:

1. We were making extensive use of symbolic links to share packages
    among various Zope projects.  This requires special care and
    was the main reason I wrote my own scrips.

    I don't expect that this would be an issue for Python.

2. I initially tried to conver our entire repository, including all
    branches.  This would have taken days.  I finally decided to just
    convert our trunk, which took several hours.  The main time
    sink was in the load step of the conversion process.

    I suspect that much of the time hit was due to the Berkely DB
    back end.  I think I've heard that the file-system-based back end
    is much faster in general.

We're using the BDB back end because that's all that was available
at the time we converted.  Every few weeks, the database gets wedged
and I have to do a recovery operation. Every few months, the machine gets
wedged and required a reboot. I'm pretty sure the later is due to locking
issues.  I definately recommend the file-system back-end, even though I
haven't tried it myself.  I haven't had the time to do the conversion
myself. :(

I'll also say that, on balance, I'm *very* *very* happy with subversion.
I recommend it highly.

> Other than that, I'd just like to see an explicit mention in the PEP
> of a plan to preserve the pre-conversion CVS tarball forever.

+1

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
CTO                  (540) 361-1714            http://www.python.org
Zope Corporation     http://www.zope.com       http://www.zope.org